I recently got a new laptop with Windows 8. I’ve been trying to not hate the removal of my start menu too much. One of the changes they also made, is that User-Account-Control can’t really be disabled without a registry change– and if you make that registry change, most of the Metro/Modern UI apps will no longer work! Having certain applications not run as administrator can really be a problem, however… Visual Studio needs admin access to create IIS web applications, for instance. Additionally, shelling out to cmd.exe for doing a multitude of different things will be very frustrating when you don’t have those admin privileges that are rightfully required to do administrative things…

Unfortunately, there’s no easy GUI way to tell Windows 8 to always launch applications as an administrator. You can right click on a shortcut and select ‘run as admin’ each time– or even define a shortcut and set ‘run as administrator’ on the compatibility tab– but this doesn’t work if you use start->run->’cmd.exe’, such as I do… It also doesn’t work if you’ve pinned solutions to your task bar, such as I do for Visual Studio.

Thankfully, after some searching, I found a solution. You can have any executable on your computer run as admin(assuming you have permission to do so), by adding entries to this registry key:

Simply add a new string value, paste the full path to the executable(such as c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe), and then edit the value to say ‘RUNASADMIN’. Next time you start that executable– through a shortcut, by going to start->run, through entries pinned to your taskbar, or double-clicking on an associated file in explorer, Windows 8 will actually run it as an admin, as you require.

I recently wanted to write some code that analyzed URLs to determine if the source was the same– eliminating sub-domains. For something simple like “sensiblesoftware.com” or “www.sensiblesoftware.com”, this is easy. However, what about othes countries? Something like “www.company.co.uk” or “company.co.uk”? It was clear I needed a list. Initially, I went and found the TLD/Top Level Domain list at the ICANN. It was clear by just looking at this, however, that it didn’t include individual country’s second level domains, such as “.co.uk”. This makes it difficult to use for getting the effective organization domain(which would be the ‘company’ in company.com or company.co.uk).

After looking, I eventually found a list of these, but it wasn’t formatted very nicely for use in programming, so I formatted it and I’m providing the list here– you can easily copy/paste this list into a text file for programmatic use.

Finding icons for your software application can be tough. There are many sources of free icons that you can easily find online with a Google search. If you’re on an incredibly tight budget, but have lots of time, this can make lots of sense. The problems with this, is the amount of time it takes to find the icons you need and often times you end up with an inconsistent look and feel in your application– your icons are often pulled from many different places, and your application looks that way.

I personally prefer to buy big sets of icons. IconShock has been selling icon sets for years, and I can highly recommend their entire icon collection which is only $299 right now– that’s over 600k icons, for only $300. That’s less than $0.0005 per icon… Or roughly 20 icons per penny. Buying icons in a set like this, it’s fairly easy to find just the right icon for every part of your application, and best of all they have the same look and feel(provided you pull from the same or a similar set).

I’ve also started to make my icons larger in my applications. Traditionally, icons are only 16×16 in menus, toolbars, etc… With higher resolutions on screens, I find it’s far best to use 24×24 icons in menus and either 24×24 or 32×3 icons in toolbars. This provides a larger area for the user to see what the icon is(showing off your snazzy new icons!), identify it with the function in your software, and click.

I am finding more and more sites using Captcha and similar ‘verification’ systems to try to filter out spammers and bots. Unfortunately, the images are getting worse and worse, and hardly legible for legitimate humans, even with 20/20 eyesight to make out! As this article points out, it is simply lazy to use Captcha instead of simple Email verification and spam filtering… Even worse, I often see these captchas on small sites, or on ‘contact us’ pages– so when a potential customer needs to contact you, you must aggravate them by forcing them through this horribly designed ‘security measure’? Talk about great customer service…

It really annoys me when websites say ‘username’ when they mean ‘Email’… Just because THEY use my email as their ‘username’, doesn’t mean I know that… When something is labeled ‘username’, I don’t automatically assume I should enter my Email address, which makes it take far longer to access a seldom-used site using an account I created previously…. So please, when creating websites, call it what it is… If some management-type argues it should be ‘username’, at least put small text there that says ‘(Email address)’ or something.